Ethics, atheism, science and other topics that won't get you invited (back) to dinner parties.

Saudi Arabia

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“Respect for your elders” has never been something that I have accepted for the sake of it: We should accept people based on their merit as people and their treatment toward us. This multi-layered confusion results in many children being forced into a frustrating disposition, where they endure the brunt of intolerant adults simply because “they are your elders!” No, I believe first we must earn each others respect, regardless of age. But my reaction to this certainly does not extend as far as that great bastion of unreason, that spoke in the faculty of knowledge, known as the mutaween of Saudi Arabia – or The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The commission has become the Elvis of stupid ideas, the Led Zeppelin of clerical bullying, and the siren to all those sexually-repressed men who just can’t find a meek-enough, mild-enough Muslim sheep (i.e. a woman) to copulate with. Instead, they must vent their repression on 75-year old women.

As CNN reports

A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house.

The men were delivering bread to the elderly Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, since her age made it inconvenient to procure such items. Even Thomas Kinneally, author of Schindler’s Ark, could not conjure up a more enduring scene of human dignity, created to be usurped by the hands of unreason. Yet, here we have an example of just such a scenario.

Of course, when you say Saudi Arabia, women and “what the hell” in one sentence, in the next breath you should be contemplating the mutaween. Where the death knells of reason sound, there the mutaween will be bouncing up and down, pulling hard on the rope. The mutaween have more than 3,500 officers, and additional thousands of volunteers.

As the BBC reports: “They patrol the streets to enforce the country’s deeply conservative Islamic codes of dress and morality. [They] instruct shops to shut during prayer time and keeps a lookout for any slips in strict dress codes”. They also have the power:

to arrest anyone engaged in homosexual acts, prostitution, fornication, or proselytizing of non-Muslim religions, they can also arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, enforce Islamic dress-codes, Muslim dietary laws (such as the prohibition from eating pork) and store closures during the prayer time. They prohibit the consumption or sale of alcoholic beverages and seize banned consumer products and media regarded as un-Islamic (such as CDs/DVDs of various Western musical groups, television shows and film). They also actively prevent the religious practices of other religions within Saudi Arabia

They have struck many false chords in the past: Consider their banning of the letter “X” because it looks too much like the Cross from Christian lore. This is a country that is proudly anti-Semitic, in the core sense of the word, even scorning Catholics to the point where they are ousted from the country – even when they are practising religion privately in their own apartments. I am anti-theistic, but this is simply ridiculous – this is not a thorough dismissal of Catholic ideas, it is dismissal of Catholic persons. Even if a non-religious party did this, I would still defend his right to practice his belief in the privacy of his home.

Famously, in 2002, 15 girls were burnt to death in an outbreak of fire because the mutaween did not allow fire-fighters to help them. Why, you may ask? Because the girls were not wearing their abayyas, or head-scarfs. Do these clerics – note, clerics, people who have hotline to god – not think it strange that this being they worship and, quite literally, think is so “great”, would be hurt by little girls wearing a piece of cloth on their heads? How on earth, at such a moment where human lives are so blatantly in danger, can theology honestly come into play?

If anyone does not believe that religion allows for madness to become doctrine, for the insane to become powerful, one need not look further than these mullah-minded horrors of humanity.

Amidst these clamours of discord, the one resounding chime will be Sheik Abdul Aziz Ben Baz’s fatwa of 1974, which stated that the earth is flat. In a brilliant piece of illogic that would have Russell spinning, the blind cleric stated:

If the earth is rotating, as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom.

With the wallowing in the mire of mumbo-jumbo, it is perhaps no wonder that such flowers of idiocy arise. All the ideas and the sheer anger that drives them toward actualisation in brutality, leave a horrid taste in ones mouth. In this climate, it is no wonder that 75 year-old women can be sentenced to lashing. It almost seems as though it ought to happen, given the backward nature of this country. Once a soil is fertilized with such horror and decay of human sensibility, what can bloom but poisoned flowers?

If you are as horrified as I am, please alert people to the plight of women within Saudi Arabia. Ignoring whether you agree me on a god, I hope, at least, you can agree with me in my defence of our fellow humans.